Bridging Senior Management Disconnect with Digital

This is the age of fast, give-it-to-me-now, you-better-make-it-simple convenience. But how do we convince senior management of this new reality?

A 2015 CA Technologies survey, published in March 2015, states that “When it comes to applications, consumers care about three major characteristics:

Quick Loading -- 68 percent of consumer respondents, who left a brand because of poor load times, said a loading time of six or less seconds was acceptable -- and slightly more than half of those respondents demand a load time of less than three seconds.

Simple Functionality -- More than 70 percent of consumers ranked ‘perform tasks with little difficulty’ and almost 80 percent ranked ‘easy to use features’ as top drivers of their decision to use or purchase an application.

The Assurance of Security -- Out of users who had a fair or poor experience, 10 percent said that they would leave a brand forever because of issues with security."

The survey of 6,770 consumers and 809 business decision makers in 18 countries found that there is a real disconnect between how businesses and consumers think.

There is a difference in how well businesses(sic) decision makers think industries are able to provide application technologies and how well consumers believe the same industries are actually delivering,” the survey states. “In short, businesses think application delivery is largely better than it is.”

Senior management are by and large disconnected from the world digital has built. They don’t use the apps, websites or intranets. “CEOs are convinced that their organizations are doing a far better job with data analytics than they actually are, according to a recent survey from Teradata,” CIO INSIGHT wrote in February 2015. “The report, titled 'The Virtuous Circle of Data: Engaging Employees in Data and Transforming Your Business,' reveals that most CIOs, directors and other executives believe that their companies do a poor job of capturing and distributing data. They also say data access is either strictly controlled and/or cumbersome. But a significant share of CEOs mistakenly feel that employees are getting access to all the data they need.”

“Enterprise Search is considered a critical success factor in 78 percent of organizations responding to global survey,” according to a 2013 Enterprise Search and Findability survey. Yet, only 3 percent of employees considered it very easy to find the desirable information. Why is something as mission critical as enterprise search performing so badly in so many organizations? Because senior management don’t see it as a real priority.

If you are managing a website or app you must have a change management plan for your senior management. You must allocate a certain amount of your time every week to helping them understand the full implications of the digital revolution. One of the best strategies is to identify a potential champion and really work on them. Don’t show them boring data or text. Show them videos of real customers and their frustrations. You need to be willing to spend 2-3 years doing this because changing minds takes time. But the rewards will be huge.

With a senior management champion and a senior management team that genuinely gets digital, you are on the road to success.